Speech from the Eighth Annual New York Conference
on Private Property Rights (2004)

Robert J. Smith

Landownership in America

Thank you. It is always an absolute delight to be up here.
In the past we have had foul weather many times with heavy rain
and snow, but this is a beautiful October day. Also I am delighted
that I am one of the few people that I think Carol has ever had
up here more than two times, and that I consider quite an honor,
too.

As Carol mentioned, one of the problems with standing up as a
lightening rod is that unfortunately there is lightening out in
the world. So if you stand up on a lot of these issues in Washington,
you can become very unpopular in a hurry.

What I want to talk a little bit about is what is going on with
the ownership of the American land. If I have enough time left,
I want to talk a little bit about the origins of the vast movement
towards regulatory takings in this country, how we ended up in
that area, since our last talk is going to wind up with that issue.

The total U.S. land area is 2,271,343,000 acres. That is a
lot of land. It is a big nation. The federal government owns,
manages, or controls about one third of the American land. At
one time we knew fairly precisely exactly or close to exactly
how much land the feds owned. For instance, in 1982 that figure
was 768,532,000 acres, slightly over one third of all the U.S.
But that was the year that ANLCA, the Alaskan Native Land Claims
Act, was passed, finally giving tens of millions of acres of all
the land in Alaska to the first Americans up there, the native
Americans, and to the state of Alaska. Because Alaska is so huge,
that instantly dropped the percentage of land owned by the federal
government down to around 26 percent. And now one of the things
we find very interesting in Washington, DC, to some degree, is
that this data which you think would be pretty easy to get is
almost impossible to get. It has also become a political football.
BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, used to come out annually
with their book on land statistics in the United States, which
was pretty impeccable coverage of the amount of land ownership,
who owned how much, how much the Department of Transportation
owned, how much the Army Corps of Engineers owned. That stuff
is no longer compiled in any one place. It is hard to get that
data.

A couple of years we were trying to do a piece with the Nevada
State Legislature, and I was calling everywhere to find out exactly
how much land in Nevada is owned by the federal government. We
know that it is probably over 90 percent. Some people have said
it is 93 percent, even 94 percent. Well, nobody had that data.
The state didnt have it; the feds didnt have it. I
finally tracked down a woman at one of the BLM
(1) offices out
there, whose responsibility was to actually sign the checks, sign
the PILT (2)
checks that are given to the various counties in lieu of taxes
because the government owns all that land, and she was a very
conscientious government bureaucrat. She felt a moral responsibility
to get that right. They deserved every penny that was theirs and
they didnt deserve a penny more, and she actually had to
go out and start her own data bank because, she said, I cant
even rely on my own agency, I cant rely on the GAO
(3), I cant
rely on any of these things. As she started to gather this data,
she found out about the huge land transfers in the state. When
they created the Great Basin National Park in Northeastern Nevadaa
big chunk of land out in the Ruby Mountainsa decade before
I talked to her, it transferred all that land from by the Forest
Service, where most of it had been owned, with some owned some
by BLM, to the National Park Service. Over a decade later, although
all three of those organizations had computers, nobody had ever
even managed to figure out that perhaps it was necessary to subtract
that amount of land from BLM and Forest Service ownership and
add it on to National Park ownership. Things as simple as that
arent being done. And so we are still facing this problem
that we dont really know how much land the federal government
owns.

They seem to have sort of a football aspect to this. Some agencies
tend to fudge the amount; others brag about it. The Department
of Interior will admit that they own about one in every five acres
in the United States, about twenty percent. The other day I was
just going through Dulles National Airport, and there is a huge
poster they have on the wall, thats been up for awhile,
advertising National Public Lands Day. The poster says, You
own 600,000,000 acres of America. You own one third of the nation.
Please help us take care of it. That is an interesting thing
why you have to ask people to take care of something they own.
But as I said, we cant get accurate data.

One of the first things that happened when the Republicans
took over the U.S. Congress going into the 104th Congress
following the elections of 1994 was that some of the freshmen
CongressmenRichard Pombo, I guess he was a sophomore then,
but a few others, including Helen Chenoweth, who was a freshman,
and so onwent to the GAO and requested a study. Lets
find out once and for all who owns land, they said, how much federal
land there is, how much state land there is, how much county land
there is, how much municipal land there is. You can get that.
It is just very time consuming and tedious, but that is what the
GAO is supposed to be about. Well, they essentially punted on
it. They came back with a nice study, but it didnt have
the data. They said it would be too difficult to get that data.
So we still dont know.

But we do know that what the federal government owns is around
700 million acres and rising, one third, and as you know, most
of the public domain is located in the west with about two thirds
of all the land in the thirteen western states owned by the federal
government. But additional land holdings by state governments,
county governments, and municipal governments, where land ownership
has accelerated most rapidlythis is the fastest growing
area of government land acquisitionbrings the total land
ownership of the U.S., as far as we can tell, to probably about
44 percent of all the acres of land in America. There are two
or three different groups who have made some efforts at this.
Some say 42 percent, some say it may be as high as 48. That shows
all the uncertainty in this, but, whatever it is, it is an awful
lot of land.

Even in areas that you would think the data would be so easy to
get, this is not the case. Some of you may know Frank Gladics,
who has been in the forest products industry. He is now the Director
of Forest Issues for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
In the past, when he was doing some work on PILT payments around
the country, he went to Multnomah County where Portland, Oregon,
is, and he found out that they owned vastly more amounts of land
than the county even thought they had. Counties dont even
know what they own.

One of the few states that has really done a careful job has
been the State of Arizona, and Arizona has been noted for having
some of the most free market, pro-private property rights state
legislators. They demanded that the General Lands Office do a
thorough study right down to getting the tax records from every
municipality, every county, and so on. To everybodys surprise,
it turned out that 87.5 percent of all the land in Arizona is
owned by the government. Only 12.5 percent of Arizona is in private
hands. One of the ironies there is that is one of the states where
there is such a big push for smart growth and stopping urban sprawl.
Theyve already got the whole state; 87.5 percent of the
land is desert and cactus. They can own all the land they want,
but the problem is that too many fat cat Republicans have retired
down in Scottsdale, bought a piece of land, put up their $3 million
house and have a beautiful view of the mountains with some cactus
across the street. They forget to buy the lot across the street
and the next wealthy Republican retires down there, buys that
lot, puts his house up, and destroys the view of the guy who was
there the year before. Suddenly everybody says that there ought
to be a law against this There is too much growth in this
state We need smart growth. And wealthy retired
Republicans end up working with the Sierra Club out there to promote
smart growth.

Consider that amount of land, whether it is 42 percent or 44
percent or slightly higher. That is a staggeringly high percentage
of government ownership of land and resources in a free society
supposedly based on the beliefs of the founding fathers that the
cornerstone of our freedom depends upon the widest possible distribution
of land securely protected under a system of private ownership
of property. Whether it was Jefferson or Hamilton, who were probably
on opposite sides of some of the government debate of the founding
fathers, they agreed on this. Jefferson wanted to get rid of all
the land the government owned. He just wanted to give it away
because he believed he needed everybody living on the land. Hamilton
wanted to sell it all off to pay for the national debt, but they
all wanted to get rid of it. The 1862 Homestead Act provided to
give everybody homesteads. One of the problems there was that,
since they still didnt understand the West and the climate
of the West at that time, they made the homesteads 160 acres,
and as many of you know, that turned out to be a big problem when
people got settled in the West, because they couldnt live
on that in areas where there was no rain. Then that began to confuse
the whole issue of who should use the land or could people use
the land properly. But they could have used the land properly
if they had been allowed to own enough for a homestead large enough
to live on and have a successful ranch or farm.

There was a most interesting observation on land ownership
in America. A noted economist wrote, The public lands of
the United States exceed the combined areas of Germany, France,
Italy, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungry, and Albania.
He concluded, Where socialized ownership of land is concerned,
only the USSR and China can claim company with the U.S.
Now does anyone want to guess as to who that economist might have
been? It is not Milton Friedman. I guess nobody knows. It turns
out that what makes this such an interesting observation is that
it was a liberal economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, whose work
many of you may know or have read. The other interesting thing
about that quote is that he said, The only two countries
on the planet that can claim company with the U.S. when it comes
to socialized land are USSR and China. That quote was written
in 1981. Guess what! The USSR is gone. Chinese collective farms
are gone. It is likely the United States of American, the shining
city on the hill, now has the most socialist land system of any
country on the planet.

There are two observations here. One is that practically nobody
knows that or understands the significance of that. And secondly,
the socialization of our land is growing. It is not even slowing.
It is still continuing to grow and the question is what is the
purpose? Where are we going? What is the end? What is the goal?
Congress neither seems to know how much land is owned by the government
nor even care.

As someone that was in Washington who has testified any number
of times over the past decade on National Heritage Areas and particularly
on the CARA bill (4)
when it came up, Ive observed that one of the things is
that the huge CARA land grab bill was pushed by hard core conservative,
property rights Congressmen. These Representatives, Don Young
of Alaska and Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, pushed CARA to essentially
get $3 billion a year to buy up more private land. Many of the
ranchers and so on in the West have been so depressed; these guys
are barely surviving because there are so many environmental regulations
on them now, that they can run so few cattle they can hardly make
a profit. As for the way private land stands now, with $3 billion
a year you could buy up just about every last ranch and small
farm in the country. You wonder, then, how you run a free society
and also how you run a productive society.

Anyhow, during the CARA land grab testimony, I was on the podium
with the witnesses, and I think that next to me was Chuck Cushman.
We also had Teddy Roosevelt IV and most of the Greens there, although
he is a Green Republican, and when I brought this up, when I said,
look, the government already owns 44 percent of the land in this
country. Why do you want the government to have more? Where are
we going with this? What is your goal? Do you want fifty percent?
Sixty percent? Seventy? Eighty? Just tell us what we want to know
so somebody in this country who cares about freedom and private
property can know where this federal government is going. Well,
the interesting thing was that, when I said that 44 percent figure,
it was sort of like a slapstick comedy in a Marx Brothers movie.
The ranking Democrat on the committee immediately called her staff
around her. She apparently had never even thought, had never even
raised the question in her mind in her whole life as to how much
land the government had. Did we need more land? It was just, you
know, buy up everything we want, no question of how much it was,
what the accumulated impact was, or where it was going. And she
was so concerned about that that she questioned the entire panel,
and she said, well, what do you think about this charge if it
is true? I said, I am sure it is true.

It was interesting that Teddy Roosevelt, who actually gave
the environmental speech at the Republican Presidential Convention
in 2000, Teddy Roosevelt IV said it doesnt matter. He said
this is not a question of addition and subtraction or mathematics.
This is an issue of the fact that we must save every piece of
land in America that has environmental significance. No question
of what you have. That is on the record. You can find it. Now one of the things that was interesting
I didnt know until I got into sort of a debate afterwards
with Senator Murkowski, who was chairing the hearings (5). After the hearing was over,
Senator Landrieu was in the back of the room where the heads of
The Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, and all these groups
were, and whispered with them. We fortunately had Brian Bishop
there, who saw that. So Brian sort of backed up to hear what she
was talking about and she asked him, is this true what Mr. Smith
said? And he said, yeah, and it may be an understatement. She
said, My God, if the American people ever become aware of
that, that could be the Achilles heels of our entire movement.

This is one of the things that we need to do. We desperately need
to make people aware of how much land there is in the country,
and who owns it. You cant have a free society, you cant
have individual liberty, you cant have a productive society,
you cant even protect the environment well without private
ownership of land. One of the things that some of us have been
disappointed about in the Bush Administration is that we wish
they had not shown so much restraint in halting land acquisition
and so on. We wish somebody somewhere had acted like Reagan had
done when he came in. He zero-budgeted the Land and Water Conservation
Fund and said that we have too much government land already. Lets
take care of what we have. You remember that was also Secretary
Watts plan. So that is certainly one thing we want to do.
It would be wonderful to get back to find someone who could lead
us by bringing up legislation again and think it out carefully
this time to see what we can do in starting to move a bill for
no net loss of private lands. There is too much government land.
Freeze it now and then slowly begin to work backwards. Keep private
lands in private hands.

Certainly the people in the Bush Administration know this.
My goodness, Gale Norton and Lynn Scarlet, they know, they have
heard all about private stewardship and private conservation.
Gale Norton has said that private landowners are often the best
stewards of the land. When she visited a few years ago with our
Center for Private Conservation down to Thomas Jeffersons
Natural Bridge in Virginia, after she had walked through that
area in the morning, she came back and said, that has been there
for 250 years now. Nobody had to force these private landowners
to pass a regulation for them to keep this in the same pristine
condition it was when Thomas Jefferson first set eyes on it. It
was in their own interest to do so and that is the good thing
about private land ownership and private stewardship.

Essentially I will leave the issue here, but I want to bring up
just one thing and talk about the good things that private landowners
are doing, what is happening to forestry in this country, and
so on. There is a whole issue of perpetual conservation easements
that keeps coming up. I think it is probably one of the most dangerous
ideas that has ever come up to assume that you can lock up any
particular piece of land for all of eternity, for perpetuity,
and know how it is going to be used. The idea is wrong because
the essence of a free society, the essence of a free economy is
choice. That is what every trade is about. That is what the economy
is about: choice. But what you are doing with a perpetual conservation
easement is precluding all future choice. If there is one constant
we know about Mother Nature, it is that there are no constants
in nature. Everything is changing. Therefore, even from the point
of view of the environmentalists, if you really cared about protecting
the environment, rather than just having national land use control,
you would be opposed to perpetual conservation easements.

Just about ten or fifteen years ago everybody thought that there
was so much forest fragmentation, that the forests were being
cut so fast in America, that all the interior forest birds, all
the neotropical birds that nest in forests, were disappearing.
There was a panic that started this whole rush to getting conservation
easements on all the forest land in New England, passing laws
against clear-cutting, and all this kind of stuff. The data finally
came out, approximately thirty to forty years of data essentially,
of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service breeding bird surveys, and,
lo and behold, they find out while nobody was looking forest birds
are doing quite well, as a matter of fact. What was really in
trouble was grassland birds. Now they have pretty good data on
grassland birds. Seventy percent of all the birds that live in
the grasslands in the United States are vanishing. One of the
reasons for that, of course, is something that should have been
obvious. The reason for the decline in grassland birds is that
the forests are coming about all over New England. All the forests
are coming back all over the Great Lakes region. They are being
reforested naturally. People are planting more, people are getting
out of small farming because we have mechanized farming in the
West. To prove how far this has gone, there is a proposal just
now that has been put before the U.S. Department of Interior that
they want to list the cottontail rabbit, the common bunny rabbit
in your yard up in Maine and so on, which is now a threatened
species, put it on the endangered species list because it lives
in little fields and the fields and meadows have all disappeared
because they have all gone back to forests. Thats why you
dont want to lock yourself into one particular land restriction.

With that I would say that I just hope that we can begin to
use all these groups all around the country and at least develop
some sort of informal network among all of our property rights
groups and foundations and centers and e-mail networks and so
on so we can track what we are all doing and see if we can begin
to wake up the American people on the issues that we are having
with the loss of private property. Americans need to hear that
the loss of private property not only discourages freedom but
it ends up destroying the environment, and that we need to return
to the vision of our founding fathers and have a system based
on private ownership of land and resources. Thank you.

Notes and Abbreviations:

(1)
BLM - Bureau of Land Management(2)
PILT - Payments in Lieu of Taxes(3)
GAO - General Accounting Office(4)
CARA - Conservation and Reinvestment Act. The proposal called
for $3 billion annually for land acquisition to be set aside from
federal royalties from oil drilling into a trust fund outside
of the Congressional budget process(5)
CARA Hearings - CARA legislation had several reincarnations during
the early 2000s. Sen. Frank Murkowski (R, Alaska) chaired
the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2000 and
Sen. Mary Landrieu (D, Louisiana) was a minority member of the
committee.